As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Many companies (e.g., enterprises) use a database (e.g., a document repository or other type of database), such as Microsoft Sharepoint®, to store documents associated with the enterprise (e.g., generated by employees). Such document repositories provide various features, including enabling files to be shared among different groups, restricting access to confidential documents, and period backups of the contents of each database. Some documents (or particular versions of documents) may be inadvertently deleted (e.g., a user accidently deletes the documents) or become corrupted (e.g., due to disk failure etc.). In such situations, a user may request the company's Information Technology (IT) department to restore particular documents (or particular versions of documents) from a database backup. For example, a user may request a particular set of SharePoint® objects (e.g., documents, etc.) to be restored from a backup.
To restore even a relatively small number of documents, the entire database back up is restored and then the relatively few documents that were requested are retrieved from the restored database. However, restoring a database backup that includes a large number of documents may consume a significant amount of time and computing resources. For example, when using Microsoft® Content Migration, the entire contents of the database backup are restored to a staging database, typically resulting in a large number (e.g., thousands) of database objects being restored over a long period of time (e.g., many hours) and occupying a large number (e.g., gigabytes) of space on the staging database. Thus, thousands of database objects may be restored over several hours and occupy gigabytes of space on the staging database, even when less than five documents (e.g., occupying a few kilobytes) were specified in the backup request.